It hasn’t even been three weeks since the Iran war started, and it’s already costing the country more than a billion a day. The first 100 hours of the conflict alone consumed $3.7 billion. On top of this, the Pentagon’s pre-strike military buildup (a repositioning of more than a dozen naval vessels and over 100 aircrafts) cost an estimated $630 million before a single bomb fell. Now, two congressional officials have reportedly said that a funding request of up to $200 billion has been informally raised by the Trump administration, according to The Washington Post.
While the Trump Administration has not yet formally requested the funding from Congress, at the current rate of spending on the war, if approved, the $200 billion in funding could potentially fund the war for another 100 to 200 days.
According to estimates from the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, the war in Iran cost $16.5 billion within its first 12 days. That’s an average of $1.38 billion per day. At that rate, $200 billion could fund the war for nearly 145 more days, or through mid-August. In the background of all this, of course, rests the national debt, which reached a record high of $39 trillion this week.
